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Jane Fishman: Going off the grid in Big Sur

There comes a time when you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.

For me, during a two-week rendezvous with the left coast, it came in a bookstore in Carmel, Calif., a once-beautiful area that looks a bit junked-up to me. I was lost, as usual, trying to find a health food store called Cornucopia, waiting in line to buy a book when this nun dressed head to toe in brown and white, no hair showing, sensible shoes, clear eyes, started giving me directions. When she saw how flummoxed I was at the map she was drawing, my head turning this way and that, me asking, “But isn’t the ocean west?” she said, “Oh, I’ll take you there. I have a meeting but follow me. I’m going that way.”

So I did, but while I’ve been accused of having a heavy foot, she nearly left me in the dust on Rio Road. When we got to the store I lowered my window and said, “What kind of nun are you?”

“A real one,” she shot back.

“No, really,” I answered.

“Google me,” she said, obviously in a hurry.

Google her?

So I did. Turns out she came from a Jewish family in White Plains, N.Y. — even more Jewish-lite than my own — and always wanted some spirituality in her life. That’s as far as I got with the interview because the house I’m staying in above Esalen in hilly Big Sur has sketchy internet even though it is free between midnight and 6 a.m., the woman next door (an astrologer) tells me, except I have to be near her house and it is very dark between midnight and 6 a.m.

No internet, you say? No texting? No Facebooking? Is that possible? I’m in a house with Himalayan pink salt, sunflower seed butter, organic polenta, organic blue agave and Baba Ram Das’ book, “Be Here Now,” and there’s no cloud in the sky connecting? Believe it.

No locks on the doors either. And no billboards, no trash on the highway, very few gas stations and on this 15-mile stretch on U.S. 1 no visible houses in the hills. None. Whatever codes or restrictions these people have in place in Big Sur, well, they are working. There are a lot of people sleeping in their car for years at a time but that seems to be working too.

I knew this might be a woo-woo kind of area, all spiritual and sustainable and self-help and everyone processing everything. And it is that. My one friend here who works part-time for Esalen got me “guested” in on a day-pass so I could volunteer in the gardens thinning beets, weeding kale and washing collards — kind of what I do in Savannah, now that I think about it. Except there were a million monarch butterflies zipping around and a zillion hummingbirds fluttering their wings a mile a minute so they can drink the juice of orange marigolds or anything red.

But first thing, before daybreak, we had to go in the clothing-optional baths high above the ocean to watch the sunrise and the moon set. We shared the space with a group of folks from Israel and Palestine. They were clothed. We shared the round concrete bath of hot, hot water with some other people who had come to Esalen for a workshop of what are called the “agrarian elders.” In between watching for whales and listening for the bark of the sea lion we got to talk about the future of farming. This was a gathering of organic farmers organized by rock star farmer, writer, and west coast big thinker Michael Ableman. Later that morning when I was washing greens I heard from someone else who had been at Esalen a month. He had gone to “farm school” in the bay area — and lived near the “gourmet ghetto” near Alice Walker’s restaurant and sustainable schoolyard and the David Brower Center — and after a few years decided farming was too hard, too much work.

Maybe he’s a trust fund baby. I said I knew a lot of hard working people under 40 going at farming. Ableman says the sale or organic food in 2012 is $31.5 billion compared to $1 billion in 1990.

In the meantime I’m going to fry up some organic polenta and get back to my book. Nothing else to do but be here now.